books

Fixer Upper

/ Tessa Pagones / 2 Comments

My last post (Reading Season) sent me down a rabbit trail of horse books from my childhood. Some of them I still have, or have gotten new copies of in recent(ish) years. Some I haven’t seen or read since grade school, so I went looking online to remind myself of the stories. After reading the description of one of these books, I got curious about what book sellers had to say about some of the others. A small sample, starting with the one that started the search:

Big Jump for Robin (Suzanne Wilding): “To help her family with financial difficulties, Robin sells her beloved pony to a wealthy family with whose problems she soon becomes involved.”

Summer Pony (Jean Slaughter Doty): “Ginny has always dreamed of having her very own pony, so when her parents agree to rent her a pony for the summer, Ginny is thrilled! But when Mokey arrives, she is shaggy, dirty, and half-starved–not at all what Ginny had in mind. Can Ginny still have the summer of her dreams?”

The Secret Horse (Marion Holland): “Nickie and Gail are two horse-mad and horse-less girls. They hatch up a daring plan to steal a neglected and abandoned horse from the local pound and keep it in secret.”

I still have my childhood copy of Misty of Chincoteague, so I decided to reread that for the first time in decades. I found that I had forgotten over the years that it didn’t start out being about Misty. Paul and Maureen were working odd jobs and saving every penny so they could buy the wildest and wiliest of all the wild ponies, The Phantom. No one knew that she had a foal (Misty) by her side, but that foal would be the only reason she was caught that year. Much of the book is about getting Phantom used to being handled and ridden, though they never do get the wild out of her.

There were Disney princess movies when I was young – certainly Snow White and Cinderella long preceded me – but for me, the fairy tales that stuck with me were these horse stories. In particular, stories in which the main character has no money for horses, and also frequently no appropriate facility to house a horse, but she is able to beg, borrow, or steal a horse anyway – Summer Pony, The Secret Horse. Stories in which the protagonist tames the wild horse – The Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague. Stories in which the main character has a great deal of horse know-how but no money, so she indentures herself to someone who has both money and horses – Big Jump for Robin.

Some aspects of these stories matched my reality with horses. I lived in the city, I certainly didn’t have the money to own a horse, and there were times my family didn’t seem to have the money for me to take lessons. My sister and I both cleaned stalls at the barn in exchange for lessons on and off during junior high and high school. We talked about pooling our resources to partially lease one of the school horses, but we could never agree on which horse and in all likelihood we didn’t have enough resources to pool most of the time.

Looking back at these books feels like hearing a new-to-me story about someone in my family that suddenly makes me realize that a part of my crazy that I thought was unique to me is in fact something I come by honestly. I’m not sure how I missed that my particular horse crazies are so common. Not just in that others in numbers great or small would have read these same books, but in that the books were written in the first place. The themes preceded the books enough to make the books necessary, or at least possible.

There is a mix of unlikely fantasy and scary reality in the books I loved. The girls in The Secret Horse not only have to steal the horse, they have to find an abandoned barn to keep him in (in the middle of Washington DC) – and they do. The wild horse tamings of The Black Stallion and Misty are improbable but something I’m sure every young horse lover dreams of. I know I did. The scary reality parts mostly have to do with horse illness or injury. Early in Summer Pony, Mokey gets out of the converted garage the family uses to house her and gorges herself on apples, leading to a very scary night of colic. It is worth noting that in Winter Pony, the sequel to Summer Pony, Mokey (because of course Ginny was able to keep her past summer) turns out to be in foal from a stallion at the farm where they found her. Because what first-time horse owner doesn’t need a carelessly and accidentally bred foal to raise?

The protagonist of a book called Half Pint and Others was my early role model for both running a lesson barn on the cheap and for doing stupid things with horses and mostly getting away with it. Over the course of one summer she puts a new horse out in a field that he promptly get out of, she tries to rush her own horse onto a trailer and gets her ankle tromped on, she has to euthanize a horse she was given that turns out to be terminally lame, she breaks her arm falling out of the hay loft, and she spends far too much time chasing loose horses or treating their wounds once she finally gets them back home.

Taming the wild horse, nursing the sick or maltreated horse back to health, turning the nag into a dream horse – and doing it all on a shoestring budget with inadequate facilities – these are surprisingly hard ideas to let go of. With three horses outside my window now, I know that in my heart I am still that horse-crazy, horse-less girl. My father was born in 1926 and he grew up with a Depression era view of scarcity that never really left him. I feel like there’s an equivalent for people who grew up wanting horses but who didn’t have money for horses. We never really believe that we can afford them, or that we deserve them, or we never stop thinking that the one we save or find or capture in the wild will, against all odds and also against all our experience, become the horse of our dreams.

I spent twenty formative years figuring out how to spend the least amount of money to get access to horses. The horse world thrives (I say this in the present tense without knowing for sure, but I bet it’s still true) on the desire of horse-crazy kids and young adults to do just about anything in exchange for time with horses. I traded work for lessons, I traded work for housing. I arranged my life to have no expenses because I couldn’t earn enough money to pay them. I rode crazy horses. I worked crazy schedules. I was thirty years old before I ever had a job where I had two days off in a row, and older than that before I had a weekend on the weekend. I trained horses for sale so that I didn’t have to put any money out up front, and the owner and I would split the sale profits in whatever way we agreed (usually not in my favor).

The horses who were the easiest to get access to for free were often the hardest to ride. I took a lot of pride in being able to ride those horses, and also in becoming known as someone who could ride them. It is fair to say that I went looking for difficult horses, though I wouldn’t have said that at the time. Once I finally broke a few bones (after a decade of the luck of the young and foolhardy), I became more afraid of the difficult horses, but my sense of who I was was so tied up in being the one who wasn’t scared of the scary ones that it wasn’t just a matter of not being willing to admit I was scared – I didn’t even recognize that fear was what I was feeling.

When I found my first horse that, while green, didn’t come with a host of issues that needed to be overcome, I almost let her slip by me. My riding instructor at the time was after me for months to try her and I kept finding other worse horses to look at instead. She was for sale, and since (as usual) I didn’t have any money to buy a horse, I was looking for another lease-to-sell arrangement. When I finally did go see her, I liked her ok but she wasn’t very exciting (i.e. not actively dangerous). I talked her owner into a lease-to-sell with a six month time frame. I realized after about a month that this was the horse I had been wanting pretty much my whole life, but didn’t think I’d ever find. Her owner agreed to a payment schedule, and she and I learned together for the next nineteen years.

As I read this over I see that my history with horses looks a lot like a history of bad relationships. I did realize that at some point. I remember saying of my first big bay gelding that I supposed it was an improvement that I was limiting my desire to fix the broken to horses instead of continuing to include humans in my scope. I still have my second bay gelding, who I bought about 15 years after the first one, as proof that recognizing a pattern doesn’t make it go all the way away.

I don’t know that stories of appropriately matched horses and riders learning safely together would make very exciting books to read, but I would love to see those stories lived out in the experience of more real life ponies and little girls. My time with my own horses has taken another turn recently, and I’m no longer trying to train them to do anything. I am, however, welcoming all the ways in which they are trying to train me. I want my horses’ horse stories to be boring stories about peaceful interactions with humans, instead of the story of how they keep having to try to to fix the broken one.

Reading Season

/ Tessa Pagones / 5 Comments

Fall mornings around here are my most magical time. It’s still dark when I wake up, so I have time to start my day slowly, but I know I don’t yet have snow and ice to contend with when I do go outside. I may wake up early and read, as I did this morning, until it gets light enough to see, and then I take the dogs out. After I feed the horses is my time for wandering, with or without my camera (well, fine, my phone), to see what this day brings.

Fall is the most evocative season for me, but it’s hard to say exactly what it evokes. I grew up in a city, in a family that did not have very many traditions and did very little holiday-related decorating. The place where I grew up did have four seasons, but not the kind of dramatic seasons that include mountainsides flaming with fall foliage. Get me near the smell of some bright yellow gingko leaves on damp concrete, though, and I am right back in my childhood.

It’s also November, which means that technically fall is half over. We are having our first week of temperatures around freezing at night, though, and I guess cold nights mean fall to me far more than the date. Fall is a good time to curl up with a book or ten. Every season was a reading season in my childhood, but there must have been a time we started coming inside in the evenings instead of running around in the alley playing kickball or freeze tag with the other kids on our block. Maybe it corresponded to the beginning of school, or maybe it was the end of daylight savings, or maybe it was the start of colder weather. At this time and place in my life, fall means fewer outside chores to do and less light in the evening, and those two things together mean more time for books.

I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 right now, I think for the first time. I read a lot of Bradbury for pleasure in junior high and high school, but I don’t think I would have found this one pleasurable then. I also think I somehow missed having Bradbury as assigned reading in any class, which would have been a good way to get me to dislike him. I know my oldest sister had his story All Summer in a Day in one of her junior high English books, but reading her assigned reading was a very different thing from reading my own assigned reading. The way Bradbury puts words together, and the pictures he paints with them – that’s the same whether it’s Dandelion Wine (forever my favorite book of his), The Martian Chronicles, or Fahrenheit. For me, reading Bradbury is a journey. I open to a page and I am right there next to his characters, seeing and smelling and tasting and feeling what they see and smell and taste and feel. Early this morning, Montag and I were running from the Hound,  carried away by the river and fetching up on land somewhere out in the country, and I’ve been needing a nap ever since.

I’m not sure Dandelion Wine is technically a book for kids – it’s probably in that nebulous category of “young adult” fiction that I love: books that could just be classified as fiction but they are attractive to – but not specifically written for – teenage and advanced preteen readers. Like many of the kids’ books I love, there’s something of a seasonal arc to it – starting with the end of one school year, and ending with the first signs of fall at the end of summer. Gone Away Lake, Summer Pony, And Then There Were Five – I’m sure there are many others. There’s a natural freedom to adventure during those summer months. Children in books often get sent somewhere else so they aren’t too looked after – my mother used to say that children’s authors have to kill off the mothers long before the book starts or the kids would never get to have all the adventures. Sending them to live with an aunt or a grandfather is a slightly gentler approach.

Books like the Little House series often cover a whole year, with some of them – like Little House in the Big Woods, and Farmer Boy – celebrating the markers and rituals of each season. Maybe that’s what fall evokes for me – the rituals I lived through the written word. All the elements of butchering the pig in the Big Woods, the days getting shorter, the nights colder. The county fair in Farmer Boy, harvesting the crops, making apple cider.

I have surprising gaps in my memory of my actual childhood, but I think I remember every book I ever read. Some of them seem like I may have made them up, despite my vivid memory of the illustrations and even the format of the words on the page. I have been looking for years for something I remember as The Bunny Nutshell Library, a collection of tiny books in a box. The one I remember most clearly was about the first robin of spring, a young robin who gets so excited about being the first that he pushes the season and catches a cold. The doctor (a squirrel, maybe? or a badger?) comes to see him and says that his heart is going “boom pitty boom pitty boom boom boom” (written, incidentally, as a poem, and, I believe, in italics). I have a feeling, though I sincerely hope I’m wrong, that he prescribes chicken soup for the robin’s convalescence.

I hope I’m confusing that with Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice. The kind of thing I DO remember clearly from my own childhood is being very disappointed that the taste of chicken soup with rice was nothing like as magical as that book led me to expect. I remember my mother leaving me a lunch thermos on the dining room table (when even elementary school kids could walk home for lunch to an empty house, which now makes me feel like someone out of the Little House books – the previously undiscovered Little Townhouse in Washington DC) and it might contain chicken soup with rice, or it might contain a hot dog – you just never knew. In my memory, on the chicken soup with rice day, she left a note with the opening of the book (“In January/ it’s so nice/ while slipping/ on the sliding ice/ to sip hot chicken/ soup with rice”). I was in first grade at the time – my mother had just started work again after a 12 year hiatus for mothering young children – so I don’t at all trust my memory of the note, but knowing my mother, it’s likely I’m right.

One of the many things I don’t remember about my childhood is when I learned to read. I don’t remember not reading, and I don’t remember being read to. When my own kids were young, I discovered the joy of reading to them and hoped they would never outgrow wanting me to. Even books that drove me insane, like the Rosie and Tessa books my mother dredged up from somewhere because of the names. Tessa Snaps Snakes, and Rosie Sips Spiders. For me they were mainly a tutorial in the difference between American and British English, and possibly American and British ideas about what makes a good book. Our youngest, however, liked to hear them over and over – and over and over again. I was never so tempted to lose books, or to accidentally leave them out in the driving rain. It wasn’t the repetition – I never tired of Dr Seuss’ Sneetches and Other Stories. In fact, if my youngest child who is now 31 and lives more than halfway across the country were to call me right now and ask me to read that book to her, I would happily begin “Now the Star Bellied Sneetches had bellies with stars. But the Plain Bellied Sneetches had none upon thars” while I was still walking upstairs to get the book. I can’t ask my mother how she felt about Bread and Jam for Francis, a book I loved (and that my youngest loved equally) and that she must have read to me ad nauseum. I gather it made my sisters gnash their teeth the same way Rosie and Tessa made me gnash mine.

As much as I enjoyed sharing books I loved as a child with my own children, I even more loved discovering new books with them, though it did not always go smoothly. Rose and I took turns reading to the younger two at bedtime in their shared room (one of the few things that made sharing a room briefly tolerable). It was Rose’s turn to read when we were nearing the end of Sharon Creech’s wonderful Walk Two Moons, but she couldn’t keep reading because she was crying too hard. I sighed and said “Give me the book” and read for maybe two more pages before I, too, was unable to keep going. Our youngest, who was by then 8, took the book from me and finished reading it to all of us while Rose and I sat and wept.

These days as I walk in the fall mornings and look at whatever catches the light or my eye – different every day – I think about how to tackle my writing assignment for my latest class, or I try to remember all the lyrics to The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night while dodging fox poop on the frosty grass, or I think about how complex fall is. All seasons mark the beginning of one thing and the end of another, but fall is endier than most, even though it is my favorite. The gloom that descends in the fall has been a topic in our family for many years, and for many reasons. In Ruby Holler, another splendid Sharon Creech book we first read with the kids, the characters have recipes like accept-my-apology pie and anti-cranky crumpets and nightmare-cure ice cream and waffles for breakfast. We have long talked about creating a getting-over-sad-September soup, or a forgetting-past-falls stew.

This particular fall it’s just me here, and my now-November recipe isn’t food based. It’s walking, and looking, and taking pictures, and remembering, and also reading books both old and new. And sometimes listening to my own heart going boom pitty boom pitty boom boom boom.

Home Comforts

/ Tessa Pagones / 5 Comments

Fans and contestants of the Great British Bake Off seemed equally horrified by this week’s technical challenge, Sussex Pond Pudding, but I was delighted. I’ve never eaten it and there’s a good chance I never will, but I will always remember my introduction to it via the late, great, Laurie Colwin in her wonderful book Home Cooking.

Laurie includes Sussex Pond Pudding (as Suffolk Pond Pudding) in her chapter called Kitchen Horrors. It has very few ingredients – a suet pastry crust, a whole lemon, sugar, and butter. She uses this particular recipe to show that a kitchen horror can be in the eye of the beholder. She was thrilled with it – she described the interior as “lemon-scented buttery toffee,” but the friends she was visiting for dinner were less thrilled. Her host said “This tastes like lemon-flavored bacon fat,” while her hostess said “I’m sure it tastes wonderful. I mean, in England.” Judging from the Bake Off constestants and viewers, I’m not sure the English would agree.

My mother introduced me to Laurie Colwin, first with Home Cooking and later with her novels and short stories, as she introduced me to so many authors and books. Reading was our main family activity all through my childhood, and my mother gave us books for just about every gift-giving occasion. When we were kids, she always seemed to know the kind of books we would each like. She would never have given me Ballet Shoes, or given Darcy All Creatures Great and Small, but we had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls in the living room of the house we grew up in, and plenty of books if we wanted to branch out of our regular interests.

We moved to a different house when I was sixteen and both my sisters had gone off to college. It was a house my father had owned and rented out for many years: a townhouse converted into seven efficiency apartments, so it was me and my parents and two cats rattling around on four floors with seven kitchens and seven bathrooms. The apartment we used as the living room also had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – as did the apartment my parents moved to after that, as does the house Rose and I live in now, come to think of it. Even after having to dispose of dozens of boxes of books after my father’s death, I am still horrified when I hear people suggest downsizing their book collections.

At some point my mother’s book gifts changed from books she thought I would like in a general way to her using books like I used mix tapes. Books that told me she saw something about me that I hadn’t found the words to tell her. Books that told me things about her that she didn’t have the words to say. Books that told me she understood me, or that helped me understand her. I can only remember one time where the message went completely awry – a book about a woman whose son came out to her, and her journey from all the very wrong things she said at first to becoming an activist. It was hard for me to hear past the son’s pain to realize that she was probably trying to tell me the mother’s side of the story. It wouldn’t be till my own child came out to me that I realized all the completely wrong things to say come out of fear for your child, and out of wanting your child’s life to be easier.

The last two years I lived in my parents’ house, my senior year in high school and the year I took off before college, I wasn’t home very much. When I came home late in the evening, usually my father was in the living room, watching TV, reading, listening to music, falling asleep in his chair, or once, memorably, doing a midnight dance with an invisible partner, clad in his ratty old brown terry bathrobe, as light on his feet as Gene Kelly. My mother was usually in bed reading, and as I climbed up to the apartment on the top floor that served as my bedroom, I would look in to say goodnight to each of them.

Sometimes I would sit on the edge of the bed and my mother would read to me from whatever book she was reading at the time. I still hear whole chapters from Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year in my mother’s voice. I think it was a book that really touched something in her, and it would become the same for me a few years later when I left college feeling like the wheels were coming off my mind. Two books from my mother, A Country Year and Mary Morris’ Nothing to Declare, helped me put the puzzle pieces back together in something resembling order.

It was also in this post-college time that my mother began giving me cookbooks. Some classics from her own kitchen: The Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, The Silver Palate. Some funny and useful: The I Hate to Cook Book, good for the days I just didn’t feel like it but still needed to eat. And some that are wonderful books for reading about food, and that also contain some good (and some odd) recipes: Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and John Thorne’s Simple Things.

I have always both cooked and read for comfort. I don’t really understand people who just read a book once, and I have many books that I have read the covers off of. Home Cooking and Simple Things have stood up to my many readings, though both are a bit food-splattered from being too close to the mixing bowl while I made something from their pages. I will always draw comfort from rereading certain favorite childhood books – A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Red Sky at Morning, Dandelion Wine. But nothing will ever quite soothe me like reading Laurie Colwin’s words about the good (curried broccoli soup, lemon rice pudding), the bad (starry gazy pie made with squid, scrambled eggs with mace), and the weird (Sussex pond pudding), hearing my mother’s voice repeating the words, with the soft sounds of music and my father’s dancing feet drifting up from the floor below.